정기선사의 선박확보유형 의사결정에 관한 연구

Abstract

The volume of container movements has increased more than 10% every year since 2000 and it has made liner carriers need additional fleet.

To meet those explosive demands, the liner carriers have made investment to expand their fleet rapidly by ordering newly-built ships, making time charter contracts and attempting M&A.

For liner carriers, the advantages of economies of scale, such as cost saving, expansion of service range and provision the customers with high quality services, encourage them to expand fleet size continuously, thus carriers' operating fleet capacity has become more important factor to make their own competitiveness to the others.

When it comes to fleet expansion, among purchasing own ship, time charter, and bareboat charter, it is not easy to decide which method of ship acquisition is most efficient way to their given management environments.

This paper is to demonstrate the level of importance in 4 major factors: economical efficiency, efficiency operation, safety management and financial liquidity, by using AHP analysis when liner carriers decide ship acquisition by those three ways above. In detail, the 4 major factors are divided into 14 sub-factors and the level of importance in each factor can be used to find out the best way of fleet expansion with consideration of each carrier's different management conditions.

Traditionally, liner carriers had operated their fleets with their own ships, but explosive fleet expansion and developing new financial scheme, for example, K/S fund of Norway and K/G fund of German, have made time charter more common in ship acquisition.

Analyzing the fleet structures of world 30 top liners, it can be found that the proportion of time charter has been increasing slightly since the year of 2004 and the rate marked around 51% as of April 2008.

Another precedent study regarding this subject illustrates that, from the point of financial and operating costs, the decision of ship acquisition is different from ship sizes

and time charter is preferred in smaller sized ones.

In order to approve logically the importance grade of each factors, Analytic Hierarchy Program is used in this study. The data of this study are collected from three expert groups in liner industry: planning/purchase group, operating group and maintenance/repair group and the results are extracted as follows:

First, the entire investment cost and initial investment cost are found to be the most important among the factors. It means the total cost and beginning cost for the ship acquisition should be considered as a first priority item because the cost competition is getting more seriously considered under same economy circumstances.

Second, accident ratio takes the next stand. The shipping industry is always exposed to unexpected accidents such as, the potential risk on the sea, marine pollution and collision. According to past records, a serious maritime accident can change carrier's future status.

Third, utilization of ship space and the rate of ship operation are selected as the next ranking. Space utilization and maximizing the rate of ship operation depends on the method of ship acquisition because above two factors can be changed by on board crew who are controlled under direction of owners or charterers as per method of ship acquisition.

Finally, own ship purchasing is selected as first priority in the important level among the three types of ship acquisition, followed by bareboat charter and time charter. This result can be explained by the answer to the question, who is in charge of ship management between owners and charters.

owned ship is preferred in bigger sized vessels